Late one night in the early 80’s, I was crammed into the front seat of a car between two large men, who were chatting with the three equally big guys in the back seat. We were speeding along twisty roads high up in the mountains of Colorado. During a lull in the conversation, the guy next to me said, “What are we going to do about the little guy?” Saying this, he squeezed me even closer into the bulge of the driver. A voice from the back seat said, “We have to kill him. He’s heard too much.”I giggled.
These five men were spiritual leaders from native communities; outside their culture we call them medicine men. They had been swapping stories, talking through a wide range of topics ranging from the current activities of spirits with animal names, to difficulties with wives and girlfriends. Some of the talk seemed like gossip to me.
Humanity has often had a tradition of tricksters, people who push past boundaries of decorum to get through boundaries that hem in belief. They’re found in Africa, Asia and in the practices of Russia and elsewhere. In recent Western culture, tricksters have been put into Jungian archetypes and Joseph Campbell myth schemes – too bad for us, if you ask me, too confining and analytical. And there’s a deep history of the trickster or coyote in the indigenous nations of North America and adjacent areas. Two of the guys in the car that night were from Lakota peoples of the upper Midwest, where this kind of healer is called Heyoka.
These people are not indigenous John Stewarts. They are highly trained healers, who use jokes, and standing ideas on their heads, and shocking behavior to focus people’s attention. They don’t have an exact equivalent in the non-native American world, but rather are spiritual and religious leaders, political strategists, doctors, psychotherapists, keepers of memories, and enforcers of rules.
Our tradition likes to keep a sharp line between the secular and the sacred, a distinction that doesn’t have as much significance in indigenous traditions. By the time I had been invited to ride along with that reunion of colleagues, I knew that in suggesting I had heard too much of their secrets and had to be killed, they were confirming among themselves and telling me the precise opposite: I was trusted, and I was included. I was being offered a real compliment.
Maybe one of the reasons I fit in with these men was that I didn’t have my own religious hang-ups to block what they were offering. I had been raised in a Jewish tradition by a Marxist married to a scientist – not a recipe for much participation in the numinous. I wasn’t an atheist as much as a non-theist. My early family life excluded the transcendent and the immanent: anything that was seen as non-rational.
The engagement of the healers in the world around them was electrifying but not immediately apparent. They loved playing the fat sleepy Indian, but behind their sagging lids they missed nothing. They would recount meetings we had been in together and peel away layer after layer, making fun of everyone, no detail unnoticed. There was no division between healing sick people and healing sick worlds – that was the first point to capture my interest. In fact I knew several of them were active in AIM, the American Indian Movement, which was a kind of native liberation and sovereignty effort, including direct confrontation with their oppressors. I knew AIM people who slept with pistols under their pillows.
The healers were less interested in shooting than they were in transforming. For the first time, I began to engage a world outside of my immediate senses – these guys wouldn’t allow me to not commit.
My own Western culture includes a subset of people who put their attention to controverting and disproving the existence of god and other aspects of a world they can’t see or touch. Some are professional skeptics, captured by a need to obliterate beliefs in others because they don’t have it themselves. They base their aggressive disbelief on what they feel are violations of logic, as well as on the horrible excesses of religions. Some scientists have this hobby too, because their religious beliefs (in science) feel threatened by what they fear are competing belief systems.
It’s hard for me to not conclude that pugnacious and truculent antitheists like the late Christopher Hitchens or Bill Maher doth protest way too much. Wallowing in stories of institutional excess, they proclaim a set of rules that they call the Enlightenment or rationality, and then knock down the systems of belief that don’t measure up to their personal version of the world. It’s a schoolboy trick by smart articulate people, but it’s also a form of domination and control, more than the devastating rebuttal they think it is.
Scientists sometimes also use this circular reasoning: they complain that religion isn’t scientific. Religious belief isn’t a lot of things it doesn’t claim to be, including scientific. I’m a critic of scientific mistakes, excess, and arrogance. But I don’t condemn the idea of science itself just because some people misapply it. It’s equally silly to condemn beliefs in the transcendent because Queen Isabella banished my relatives from Spain in 1492.
OK so what do I believe? Answering this brings us to praying dogs.
Little Jimmy recognizes the squeak of the refrigerator drawer that holds the cheese, his favorite food. He rushes into the kitchen and sits still, nearby. He stares at me with his ears back, beseeching. As the omnipotent and omniscient Supreme Being that I am in Jimmy’s universe, he petitions and supplicates, he engages in actions that are not easily distinguishable from what I’d call prayer. Sometimes his prayers are answered, sometimes not. But he always prays to the Cheese God.What does Jimmy know of me? Is there any room in his tiny mind for understanding my ideas about hegemony, the need to change the oil in my Jeep, the love I feel for my children, or what I’m doing when I sit for hours with this flat object on my lap and stab it rapidly with my fingers? My actions and concerns are unknown, and unknowable by him. But his belief in me and his adoration of my every action are indisputable.
Jimmy gets to lick the hand of his god, and to jam his ten pounds into the crook of my arm at night to sleep safe and warm. My god is not nearly as accessible as Jimmy’s. But I like to hold the idea that just as Jimmy cannot think about his god's concerns and actions – the actual content of my existence – this is true for me too. My indigenous healer friends find the holy everywhere the world around them, in the rustling grasses and buzzing bugs, and in the colors and smells of the entire physical world: Black Elk said, “The holy land is everywhere.” This is the starting point for everything that I’ve been gradually learning to believe in.
I bring this mindset to the salt marsh. Staring out over it, smelling it and feeling it under my feet, my attention is drawn away from the mechanical and mechanistic world to something that feels bigger and safer – and mostly unknowable. I no more surmise a white male god up in the sky standing at the pearly gates with a big book of my sins than I accept the choleric fulminations of atheists who fervently believe in the wrongness of fervent beliefs.
I’ve had wonderful help over my lifetime, from my wife the Rev Mary, from my healer friends, from a prayerful Jimmy and many others, in pushing over the iron fence of rationalism that obstructs me from the intensely complex and somewhat unknowable world tapestry all around. I don’t really understand it; I don’t even try very hard to understand. But I love it, and as Jimmy will tell you – that’s enough.
